Faced with an increasingly difficult challenge in growing both average revenue per user (ARPU) and numbers of subscribers, wireless carriers are trying to develop a host of new products, services, and business models based on data services. One such service is location-based services, which provide information specific to a location including actual locations of a user. It is expected that location based services will generate additional business for the carrier, from both the mobile user and content providers.
For the mobile user as well as the service provider, location-based services offer many opportunities. For example, location-based services can increase revenue of the service provider, e.g., network carrier, while improving services to end users, e.g., mobile users. Some examples of location-based services that can be provided to the mobile user include:                Providing the nearest business or service, such as an ATM or restaurant;        Providing alerts, such as notification of a sale on gas or warning of a traffic jam;        Providing weather reports which are germane to the location where the user is using the mobile device; and/or        Providing advertisements to end users, e.g., recipients, etc.        
For the network carrier, location-based services provide value add by enabling services such as:                Resource tracking with dynamic distribution (e.g., taxis, service people, rental equipment, doctors, fleet scheduling, etc.); and        Proximity-based notification (push or pull) (e.g., targeted advertising, buddy list, common profile matching (dating), and automatic airport check-in).        
Currently, wireless companies already have the ability to determine a person's location through various mechanisms. For example, some wireless devices are GPS enabled allowing them to use satellites to determine their location. In other cases, cell tower triangulation or single cell tower location is used to determine location. For more coarse-grained depths using a web browser, an IP address lookup table correlates the IP address with a specific region. This is useful if a service does not need to know the exact location of an individual, like a weather service.
However, with the advent of mobile devices such as cellular telephones, wireless personal digital assistants (“PDAs”), portable computers, and other mobile or wireless communication devices, it is becoming increasingly more common for a user to misplace and even lose the mobile device. Also, with the increased computing capacity on these electronic assets, it is now possible and even commonplace to have very valuable information stored on such devices. For example, mobile telephones can store business data such as directories of names, addresses and telephone numbers, customer or client names and contacts, to a host of other important and proprietary information. In the event that a high value device is lost or stolen, in addition to the cost of the device, losses occur due to the loss of such information or the loss of control over such stored information. Accordingly, being able to rapidly recover the misplaced device is of considerable business benefit to the subscriber.